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High Sierra - better or worse with mechanical disks?
- Thread starter komatsu
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Boot time on SSD is fast, although it seems to take a bit after a beta update to reach full potential. Beta 7 so far the worst. After a new beta about 45 sec to boot and after a day or so i was seeing 15 sec boot. On 7, after a week I am still at about 30 sec. Not complaining, just not seeing the speed from the last few betas.
I have a "test installation" of High Sierra running on an old Lacie firewire800 drive.
It boots slowly, but once up-and-running, does reasonably ok. Loading a LARGE application such as Final Cut Pro still takes considerably longer than if it was loading from an SSD.
I make it a point to DISABLE Spotlight to prevent any indexing. This is a speed killer on a platter-based drive.
At this point in Mac history, the OS has "expanded" to the point where running ANY recent version of the Mac OS from a platter-based mechanical drive is going to be a slow experience.
I would not expect that to change in the future, ever.
It boots slowly, but once up-and-running, does reasonably ok. Loading a LARGE application such as Final Cut Pro still takes considerably longer than if it was loading from an SSD.
I make it a point to DISABLE Spotlight to prevent any indexing. This is a speed killer on a platter-based drive.
At this point in Mac history, the OS has "expanded" to the point where running ANY recent version of the Mac OS from a platter-based mechanical drive is going to be a slow experience.
I would not expect that to change in the future, ever.
That confirms my suspicion also.
I think on Apple's part, it's a very sneaky form of obsolescence.
BTW, thanks for tip on spotlight.
I think the question was in comparison to Sierra not in comparison to SSD.
Well for me I tried them both on an usb3 hard drive and I find high sierra worse. Everything loads a bit longer. But that's just my impression and it's a long time ago I tried sierra on the hdd so might me wrong
I know this is off topic, but follow me for just a second...
Snow Leopard did to HDDs (compared to Leopard) what High Sierra is doing for SSDs (compared to Sierra).
Could we be witnessing another Snow Leopard?
In other words, could High Sierra be hailed as the next truly great version of Mac OS X / macOS ?
Snow Leopard did to HDDs (compared to Leopard) what High Sierra is doing for SSDs (compared to Sierra).
Could we be witnessing another Snow Leopard?
In other words, could High Sierra be hailed as the next truly great version of Mac OS X / macOS ?
When it comes to being the next truly great version of macOS, I think this is pretty close to it. In regard to it being like Snow Leopard, you are 100% on the money. A lot of critics have mentioned it before - High Sierra focuses on under-the-hood technology, just like Snow Leopard did.
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In other news, I doubt that iOS 11 will be the next iOS 5 release (OMG I’m staying on this forever).
disclaimer: I personally feel that iOS 5 was ONE of the best, if not THE best, iOS version(s) ever made.
Considering apple won't be automatically updating non-ssd drives to apfs on HSierra, I don't think there is a noticeable performance boost. I've also seen anecdotal reports on other forums of HDD drives being slower on apfs. (You won't be able to opt out for all ssd drives any more). https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208018
Very difficult to say since beta contains diagnostic code that is running constantly and it might not be optimized like the release version should be. I haven't had a change to test the latest beta but previous versions were somewhat slower than Sierra on the original 2.5 inc hard drive. Obviously SSD would be much faster but since I only use the Mac Mini for testing purposes I haven't seen any point in installing SSD.
Given how slow hard drives are and Apples priority is in the SSD I suspect APFS wont be much faster (if any) when installed on hard drive.
I think its best to wait until High Sierra is released before making speed comparisons...
Given how slow hard drives are and Apples priority is in the SSD I suspect APFS wont be much faster (if any) when installed on hard drive.
I think its best to wait until High Sierra is released before making speed comparisons...
I am very interested in this as I have a 2011 iMac with just the HDD. It really suffers in regards to boot time and application launch time. I don’t really want to install an internal SSD. It doesn’t seem hard, just tedious. I’ve built my own computers before but don’t feel like messing with that.
I’ve considered running the OS off an external drive. I’ve looked into getting an external Thunderbolt drive but they aren’t cheap, especially larger sized ones. I’ve thought about making an external Fusion drive with an enclosure (I’ve read conflicting statements on whether that is even possible). But that isn’t cheap either, at least the enclosure.
I wouldn’t expect a huge performance boost, but they may not do it automatically for many reasons. The chief I could imagine is it would just take too long. I don’t know what upgrade times are for a pure SSD but I imagine it would be much faster, at the very least twice as fast. A 1TB spinning drive could be slow to upgrade, especially if it is an external USB 2 connected drive. They aren’t even upgrading Fusion drives automatically, which seems surprising. I wonder what percent of actual macOS systems will be automatically upgraded given the restrictions?
Whether or not APFS is faster or not it is a much better file system. HFS+ is terrible for a modern OS. Unless I hear horror stories I’d like to upgrade all my drives to it. One thing the article you linked to didn’t address was free space. I would think you need a certain amount of free space to upgrade the file system. Or is that not so?
I’ve considered running the OS off an external drive. I’ve looked into getting an external Thunderbolt drive but they aren’t cheap, especially larger sized ones. I’ve thought about making an external Fusion drive with an enclosure (I’ve read conflicting statements on whether that is even possible). But that isn’t cheap either, at least the enclosure.
I wouldn’t expect a huge performance boost, but they may not do it automatically for many reasons. The chief I could imagine is it would just take too long. I don’t know what upgrade times are for a pure SSD but I imagine it would be much faster, at the very least twice as fast. A 1TB spinning drive could be slow to upgrade, especially if it is an external USB 2 connected drive. They aren’t even upgrading Fusion drives automatically, which seems surprising. I wonder what percent of actual macOS systems will be automatically upgraded given the restrictions?
Whether or not APFS is faster or not it is a much better file system. HFS+ is terrible for a modern OS. Unless I hear horror stories I’d like to upgrade all my drives to it. One thing the article you linked to didn’t address was free space. I would think you need a certain amount of free space to upgrade the file system. Or is that not so?
Well, if this becomes a reality, this will be the last clean install this MacBook Pro will witness.
Definitely, but not in the way you mean.
Snow was the last version with Rosetta. So anyone depending on PowerPC apps could not update beyond Snow.
High Sierra will be the last version to support 32 bit apps. So anyone depending on 32 bit apps will not be able to update beyond HS.
I'm getting tired of doing a clean install every six months. I have noticed that after a clean install the computer has a better performance than incremental or automatic installs. For that reason every six months a do a clean install via usb. Besides, this machine is 2 years old and, if High Sierra does a great performance as Mountain Lion did, I will stay with High Sierra until something better. As Always, I might change my decision and continue with my habit of doing a clean installs every six months.
Watching some apple dev videos and apfs has intelligent defragmentation for HDDs. I could see this initially slowing performance, but it's supposed to only happen at idle.
No. Snow Leopard is horrible on a spinning HD compared to SSD with a modern OS.
In my experience, even a slow SSD with High Sierra (2009 13" 2.26 GHz MacBook Pro 4 GB with 6 year old Kingston V+100 SSD) is miles better than Snow Leopard on a spinning HD (2006 20" 2.0 GHz Core Duo iMac 2 GB with 7200 rpm desktop hard drive). There's frankly no comparison. The High Sierra SSD MBP just blows the Snow Leopard HD iMac out of the water for OS responsiveness. Not even in the same league.
The main problem for OS updates is the need for more RAM, but the bonus is that most machines that are 2008 or later can get reasonable amounts of RAM. However, this RAM usage issue is partially mitigated by the fact that later OSes from 10.9 Mavericks on have RAM compression. Upgrading to Mavericks or later is like getting a free RAM upgrade.
It's totally possible that Hdd has worse performance in APFS. e.g. from memory, in APFS, files will be stored in different versions. That means only the changes will be saved.
This is no big deal to SSD, but for HDD, it's a huge issue. Only save the difference means a single file will be fragmented after few changes.
Therefore, lets say we create a word document. And modify it for 10 times. In HFS+, the OS should able to save the modified file after ever modification. And after 10 times, HDD can still read a single file sequentially (no fragment). But with APFS, it is expected to be fragmented. If a single word document is fragment into 10 pieces, the high latency on HDD may make the reading much much slower on APFS.
Anyway, it's just theory, but possible. At this moment, we still know too little about APFS.
This is no big deal to SSD, but for HDD, it's a huge issue. Only save the difference means a single file will be fragmented after few changes.
Therefore, lets say we create a word document. And modify it for 10 times. In HFS+, the OS should able to save the modified file after ever modification. And after 10 times, HDD can still read a single file sequentially (no fragment). But with APFS, it is expected to be fragmented. If a single word document is fragment into 10 pieces, the high latency on HDD may make the reading much much slower on APFS.
Anyway, it's just theory, but possible. At this moment, we still know too little about APFS.